[MBCook]

It’s one of those transformative little features. But it’s especially great in PDFs where it’s not a “real” PDF but just a collection of page sized images so you couldn’t normally select the text before without OCR software of some sort.

Having it built into the OS is so handy.

[dschuessler]

I tried it with one of these image-based PDFs and didn't get it to work. Is this Apple-Silicon-only? Or is there any other step you need to do?

[Tagbert]

It is possible that it is AS only. It may use the machine learning components of AS.

Edit: As of July of 2021, Live Text was available in beta on Intel Macs so by the time Monterey shipped it worked on both Intel and AS.

Whether it works on a given document may depend on how that app displays the image. I can see where it would be complicated in a PDF where you may have combinations of text, images, and OCR’d text behind images.

[MBCook]

I’m not going to pretend it works 100% of the time. I don’t know if that’s the issue.

It works with anything that works with Monterey. So if you are running macOS Monterey you fit the requirements.